Content Category: Choice Literacy
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Literacy and Global Competence
We must build students' global connectedness as if our lives depended on it. Homa Sabet Tavangar I recently worked with an intermediate student who was upset because, he said,...
A Variety of Share Sessions
Sharing in writing workshop is a powerhouse for producing energy, excitement, and new learning to sustain writers. I’ve always pressed teachers to tap into a variety of share sessions to...
The Big Fresh March 31, 2018 What Cannot Be Unseen
Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong. Maurice Sendak Almost 100 years ago, Maurice Sendak was a child walking down the street in his city neighborhood when he...
A Community Reads “Wonder”
Author C. Alexander London wrote, “It’s a fact: people can survive without books. People can even have wonderful, full lives without books. But they can’t endure without community, and community...
Peer Support in Writing Workshop: Conferring with Jaden
Christy Rush-Levine meets with eighth grader Jaden, who talks through his struggles in writing a conclusion to his literary analysis, and how his peers helped him improve the writing.
The Writing Workout
I overuse it as an analogy, but it’s hard to ignore how often principles of fitness and teaching mirror each other. Recently, validation for my tendency came in the form...
Backward Chaining
For the last few weeks, I’ve been working in a fifth-grade classroom throughout a research-based essay unit. My focus has been on a group of six students who were far...
Why We Like Independent Writing Projects
It’s Friday morning during writing workshop, and 21 writers are scurrying around our room, gathering their materials: writer’s notebooks, writing folders, special revision pens. Some students take out a Chromebook,...
The Big Fresh March 24, 2018 Just Read
Are we not like two volumes of one book? Marceline Desbordes-Valmore I’m reading Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby book series aloud with my eight-year-old daughter. She devours every word, because...
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. Mark Strand Mark Strand’s character ate poems. I like that metaphor,...
Spoken Word Poetry
For once, the security light that never goes off in the corner of my classroom was useful. Beneath this makeshift spotlight stood a stool from my kitchen counter and my...
Object Poetry Lesson in Second Grade
Linda Karamatic explores poetry with her second graders. She displays poems students have written and teaches them about fresh language using a poem about a pencil sharpener. ...
The Big Fresh March 17, 2018 Finally Spring
Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush. Doug Larson Ahhhhh. The calendar finally turns this week to spring, which means we're about...
Forest Bathing
Some days you need to hide from possibility, step barefoot under a green cathedral of trees, breathe their essential oils. Feel the elixir dissolve in your blood like the slow...
Grammar Instruction in Fourth Grade
Melanie Meehan coaches a fourth-grade teacher who is trying to improve his grammar instruction.
The Big Fresh March 10, 2018 Enough
It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack....
Inspiring Students to Revise
If I had a dollar, maybe even a quarter, for every time I heard a young student tell me they’re done with their writing piece, I think I could retire....
Choose Your Own Grammar Adventure
It is winter. You are an English teacher, and you are starting to notice that lazy grammar errors are sneaking into your high school students’ writing. You review a few...
How to Write a Sentence
It was years ago that I sat with a stack of writing folders in front of me and delighted in reading the sweet stories that my first graders had chosen...
The Big Fresh March 3, 2018 Irish Sushi
Making sushi is an art, and experience is everything. Nobu Matsukisa Yoshimi Hayakawa moved to Galway, Ireland to learn to speak English in 2001. After settling in and seeing how...
Writing Minilesson: Feelings
Katrina Edwards uses books from read alouds as mentor texts for writing minilessons in her first-grade classroom. In this example she focuses on character feelings.
